And I really hate to keep harping on about it, but it could and should have been so different. 
Real, genuine change was there for the taking, and they deliberately blocked it. Unforgivable in my eyes.
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It’s genuinely shocking when the only alternative is Lib bloody Dem, Greens, or not bothering at all.
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Voting Lib Dem in Elmbridge is the only viable way of making sure Dim Don’s successor doesn’t get elected.
Yep. Except they are pissing me off over a development plan in Claygate. No consultation at all, no thought about the impact on locals just a money making scheme for the Council which is being rammed through as fast as possible.
Of course local issues should not influence a national election but ffs
Is that the Parish council dicking around?
Nope, quite the opposite. Elmbridge being dicks.
No change there then
So the mayor has extended and improved the ULEZ scrappage scheme to all London. No longer is it a requirement to be on benefits. Khan is digging into £50m of City Hall reserves to fund this.
Still absolutely sod all available to any non London residents in the enlarged zone. As the Kent council leader said, TFL will be funded in future by charges on our residents. Totally nuts.
It’s simple - Kent should charge all London residents £20 for driving in their county and use the money to subsidise their residents ULEZ charges
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An election to throw away 
No backbone or balls, just wish washy soundbite politics.
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Another of Starmer’s pledges ripped up. Why on earth should anybody believe a word he says in his manifesto before the next election? I see this week he was named alongside the usual Tory MPs for poking his snout in the trough and taking freebies from various corporate interests. Coldplay tickets worth 700 quid from a promoter, a box and hospitality from the Jockey Club at the Epsom Derby worth nearly £4,000, and more in this vein. We expect this sort of greed and freeloading from the Tories, it’s what they do, but from a leader of the Labour Party, when millions of people are struggling with the cost of living, record numbers of food banks, old people unable to heat their homes etc? It’s fucking disgraceful, he should be ashamed. Not least for blagging tickets for Coldplay!
It’s all very well Angela Rayner banging on about how Labour will tighten the rules on lobbying and freeloading by MPs, but it’s meaningless as long as the Party has a leader like Starmer who seems to be first at the trough to make sure he gets his whack. By keeping quiet and being too scared to address this hypocrisy by those at the top of the Party she herself is exposed as a hypocrite. Which is a shame.
Read this and weep. Keir Starmer is one greedy, entitled fucker.
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Unfortunately I suspect Labour will only get in if they become more Tory-lite and less Socialist - attracting disaffected Tory votes and the more right- wing of the Labour Party. Seems to be what they’re aiming for.
Sadly the Lib Dem’s don’t seem to be offering a credible alternative
What sanctimonius drivel.
Just admit it. You are just heart broken that he went to a Coldplay gig.
Made him totally unelectable let alone what policies he espoused
He’s Blair’s puppet, and Blair is 100% pro-Europe as we all know.
Interesting take on the current situation…
When the Tories were wiped out in 1997 we all knew it was going to happen. Tony Blair had momentum, vision and ambition. A spent Tory party couldn’t stop him. Fast forward to 2023 and the Tories are in that same rudderless burnt out state, but does anyone seriously see a prime minister in waiting in Keir Starmer? I don’t.
All I detect is a general sense of dismay and disillusionment. Starmer’s best chance at taking office is to remain silent on immigration, Brexit, or anythign that might remind the public who they actually are.
If I were Starmer, I would get Lammy, Miliband, Thornberry, Lewis, and all the other prominent Labour MPs in one room and beg them not to touch their social media accounts until after the election. The best campaign they could mount would be a vow of silence. The Tories, having no achievements to crow about, will play hard on how bad Labour would be, and the big challenge for Labour is avoid confirming it.
That, though, says everything about where we are. Where power isn’t fought for and won. It is merely the inheritance of dead men’s shoes. Starmer no more knows what to do with power than Sunak. He mouths the platitudes of green revolution but when it comes to ideas, he’s completely lost. He’ll be waiting by the proverbial fax machine to be told what to do by the Tony Blair Institute.
The problem there is that Blair himself is a dinosaur. He has the classic remainer brain rot where he thinks Britain took a wrong turn in 2016, and has been led astray by populist Tories, and is awaiting a return to sanity, whereby Britain returns to the fold of outward-looking progressive internationalism. There’s one small problem though. It doesn’t exist.
Prior to 2016, Britain and Europe’s geopolitical influence was waning, as indeed was the relevance of the UN and Western backed international organisations. Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the aid industrial complex and the NGOcracy has gradually imploded, America is increasingly isolationist and has lost interest in the middle east. The EU itself is mired in crisis, fraught with internal friction and preoccupied with the war on its doorstep. The world did not enter a political stasis awaiting Britain’s return to lead it.
As European elites have positioned themselves to “lead on climate action”, the rest of the world is more concerned with growth and the global competition for resources. The strong growth in Asia for power generation is outpacing the decline in the use of coal in the United States and Europe. The world isn’t buying what we’re selling. India, South Africa and Brazil are indifferent to European sanctions on Ukraine. The EU’s carbon taxes face challenges from China, India and Poland.
The post-covid era is a very different world to the pre-Brexit world. The lockdowns acted as an accelerant to all the baked-in decline. The trends were already set. Europe’s car industry was entering a recession before Brexit. All of Europe was and is grappling with labour shortages and energy costs. Democracy in Europe is moribund, crushed by the dead hand of technocracy. Our political elites are men of the twentieth century with twentieth century ideas and a twentieth century notion of our global standing.
What’s missing from our politics is vitality, direction and ambition. And what does it say that Tony Blair is the best Labour can do for inspiration and thought leadership? You could argue that the stultifying beigeness of Starmer is a welcome antidote to the chaos of Johnson and Sunak, but what we need is a government capable of recognising that the world has changed, and that it cannot be put back together the way it was prior to 2016. The old order is dead and politicians who cannot adapt will die with it.
The debate I have yet to resolve in my own mind is whether permanent decline is inevitable. I know the answer begins with fixing our energy problems, shit-canning the failed renewable energy experiment and getting serious about fracking and nuclear, and reforming our decrepit planning system for national infrastructure, but I don’t see that happening with this crop of deadbeat politicians.
Sadly, I don’t think our dysfunctional democracy is likely to produce anything different or better. I don’t think a new party can cut through and I don’t think traditional party politics as is currently constituted works anymore. It requires active public participation for it to work well and to enjoy any kind of legitimacy. Only the British public themselves have become lethargic and disengaged, and refuse to exert the power they have.
Consequently, politics is delegated to a self-selecting class of social climbing grifters and grievance mongers. And our media is not fit for purpose. It doesn’t attempt serious issues and wouldn’t know how to if it wanted to. It’s hard, then, to be anything other than pessimistic. We can demand better until we’re blue in the face, but it’s just not on offer.
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Depressingly true.
Now back to that odea of Benevolent Dictatorships working solely for the long term plan for the majority of the population, not for 4 personal years at the trough
That ship sailed long ago. The interests of the majority are of no consequence today, only minorities are of interest to any of the main parties who see virtue signalling as paramount among their priorities. They won’t even argue for women’s rights any longer.
Who wrote that?
Just some random on twitter. Nobody I’d heard of.
“Details of staffers private conversations expressing hostility towards Corbyn or his close allies and bemoaning Labour’s better than expected performance in the 2017 general election, and revealed instances of sexism and racism”.
No wonder Starmer, Mandelson and co want to keep the Forde report covered up, it still hasn’t been published. Instead they doubled down and went flat out for the next two years to do anything they could to undermine their own party and stymie any chance of winning the 2019 election. As Mandelson openly boasted at the time, “Every day I do what I can to undermine the Labour leader”. What a treacherous bunch they are, none more so than the current leader of the Party.
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